My weird Facebook groups

 As soon as the grandparents entered Facebook en masse the young people abandoned it. I know this from my grandchildren who told me more than once that Facebook is for old people, and that is the reality.                                I don't write anything on Facebook but I am a member of several groups, some of them are strange and interesting.

At the time of Covid, when the whole world was in lockdown and with the feeling of the end of the world, I was busy connecting all the descendants of my grandmother and her ten sisters who were scattered all over the world, it was a wonderful adventure.                                                                                                                                      And so I came to a group in Poland, a group of residents of a small Polish village from where my great-grandfather came to Leipzig in Germany in 1898.         My grandmother would be born two years later in Germany. I have no idea how he arrived with his nine daughters, his son and his wife who would die nine years later, from that small village to Germany. But it happened.                                                       And so in order to know more I joined the Facebook group of this small village that still exists. Thanks to Google Translate I corresponded in Polish with some women in the village. I don't know how ridiculous Google made my Polish but they understood me and I understood them.                                                    One of the women with whom I corresponded the most told me that there were Jews in her family, but it was a secret that was kept all these years, they were afraid to reveal it, anti-Semitism existed then and still exists in many, she said. She searched in the district archives and found some documents that were discovered in the attic of one of the houses, which contained lists of Jews, residents of the village, all of whom were killed in concentration camps.                                                                                                                  There were no Jews left in the village, they were all murdered there or sent to concentration camps during the war. The Jewish cemetery was destroyed , but later someone else sent me pictures of a group of people who decided to restore what was left of the tombstones.                                                                Every time I tried to post in the group a picture of the beautiful and old synagogue that was burned in the war, someone deleted the picture. Some things still exist. I am still a member of the group.                                                           The second group is also in Poland, my father's hometown. There are seven small towns with the same name, my father was not the person of the small details, and he also left this town when he was one year old so he didn't know much. I managed to find out that the town he thought he was born in was actually a different town and so I joined her Facebook group to understand more.                            The third group is the archive group of the city of Leipzig, where I pursued documents such as the birth certificates of my grandmother and my mother, my mother's library card when she was in first grade, and more.                                                                                                                                                      About the rest of my strange groups in another post.

                                                                                                                                  

thoughts

 I wake up at night from the sounds of an alarm somewhere far away, not here, but I hear it, the app on the phone knows where exactly it's happening. Thanks to Iron Dome that knows how to warn the exact direction of the missiles, on the screen I read the names of towns where the alarm is now sounding, if it is in a big city, Iron Dome identifies which neighborhoods it is aimed at, if it wasn't for Iron Dome we would have died here a long time ago.                                                                                                                                                       I can't fall asleep. I don't know if it will progress and reach here as well, I'm waiting. In the meantime, I'm writing beginnings for posts, later I'll forget them and they'll never be written.

I think about my grandmothers, maybe I'll write about them, when I was a child I was almost the only one who had grandmothers, my friends' parents were Holocaust survivors and they didn't have grandmothers, so I didn't notice it, I didn't think about it.

One of my grandmothers came from Germany in 1933, left her home in Berlin with her husband and my mother who was 6 years old at the time, she had no choice. The second grandmother arrived here with her husband and my father who was one year old at the time, in 1924, she was the first Jewish woman to study dentistry at the university in Warsaw, I have already written about them here before, and there is still much to tell.                                                                                                                                                                           Since the seventh of October I have been sleeping with socks because from the stories of the people who were kidnapped and returned, especially the old women, I understood that it was very difficult for them to walk in the tunnels of Gaza barefoot, yes, I have fears that may not be logical, and maybe they are.                                                                                                                                                                                 Later I start reproducing recipes in my head, maybe it will tire me, meatballs, schnitzels, the magician's rice I made yesterday, that doesn't help either. I go through a list of the families and houses on the small street where I lived in the small northern city, I count in my head my friends in Blogland and those who are no longer, and somehow in the end I fall asleep until the next sound in the "Color Red" app which is the alarm app.